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How-To Geek

Windows 7 does more than just add big, shiny new features—it also has loads of little tiny tweaks that just add a really nice touch to the overall usability of the operating system. Let’s take a quick look at one of those tweaks in the volume mixer.

We should start off by pointing out that you can right-click the sound icon in the tray, and get a quick menu that gives you access to Sounds, Mixer, etc.

If you single-click on the volume icon, it’ll pop up the slider that we’re all familiar with—but you can also click the Speaker icon to open up the Speaker Properties dialog.

Not surprisingly, you can change your speaker settings in here.

If you open up the full mixer panel, you can also click on the System Sounds icon…

Which, naturally, pops up the Sounds panel where you can disable particular sounds, or all of them.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but Windows 7 is full of these little tiny tweaks that just make things easier to use.

Comments (12)

hi, I use my USB headset for making calls on Skye, Gtalk and etc. but would lie a easy way to switch sound to my laptop speakers when listing to music. Is there a easy short cut to switch sound options?

Glad you like the windows 7 version. Yes, it’s pretty. Unfortunately it has completely removed the ability to mix sound from CD, WAV, midi or anything useful. This makes it impossible to play something and record it at the same time, which is a terrible limitation! Any ideas?

It would be neat if it allowed for application release of the mixer control. That way, my ASIO driver wouldn’t report audio output as “unavailable”, and I wouldn’t have to shut down every application I’m running or even reboot my computer to avoid it.

almost everything in Win7 is much less productive than in XP. try deleting an ad-hoc connection that you made. it’s cryptic, menus on left, menus on bottom right. in XP it’s much simpler. Win7 is such a bloat

While I like being able to control each application’s volume that doesn’t work real well in full screen applications. It takes way more clicks to do anything. And the worst part of all is the window can not be minimized! The only way to minimize it is to “Show Desktop” and then it comes right back as soon as you touch anything.
XP’s UI was so much easier to use.

Win 7 makes my old computers run faster. As far as productivity goes, I have to click lots more. Everyone at Microsoft should be forced to work on tiny screens using old computers wearing big gloves so they would be forced to refine the interface.
Ubuntu is fairly mature now. I look forward to the day I can run my CAD software under WINE.